With midterms looming and the prospect of a Democratic Congress, the White House is making a final-stage push to pass AI preemption legislation — a comprehensive federal law that would override state-by-state regulation. But the strategy now comes bundled with an entirely separate fight: child safety online.
For months, Big Tech lobbyists have sought the "holy grail" of pro-AI legislation: preemption. A single national ruleset would replace the legally complex patchwork of state regulations. But months of effort have stalled against political opposition and the looming possibility that Congress will flip to Democrats unwilling to back pro-industry deregulation.
Earlier this week, reports leaked that the White House had signaled to both child safety groups and Big Tech firms that it would endorse a slate of children's online safety laws backed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the coauthor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), as the vehicle for an overall preemption package. While online child safety does overlap meaningfully with AI regulation, it addresses only one facet of a much broader set of issues—frontier model safety, discrimination, environmental impact—that a truly comprehensive law would need to cover.
The bundling strategy has created immediate chaos. The White House apparently did not inform House Republicans, who had just passed their own version of KOSA, that it was backing Blackburn's Senate legislation. Democrats who worked with Blackburn on the Senate's version were also left out of the loop. A separate, bipartisan-backed AI preemption bill was already floating around the House. The result: a week of total confusion over which child safety bill would be included, whose version of AI preemption would advance, and who was actually driving the effort.
"No one knows really who's driving this thing," a Republican lobbyist for a midsize tech company told The Verge. "Everyone is deeply, deeply, deeply skeptical of [the bill's] movement, because everyone is on such different pages."
Central to the current White House approach is Mike Davis, a Trump-allied lawyer and founder of the Article III Project, who led a successful effort to kill a different AI moratorium in the Senate last year. To win Davis's approval, preemption legislation should protect what he calls the "Four Cs": children, conservatives, creators, and communities. The White House's proposed draft comprehensive AI law, released in March, included some of these values; KOSA covers the "children" requirement. Davis has stated he wants any legislation to address all four.
Reconciling KOSA versions poses a major obstacle. The Senate version requires tech companies to assume a "duty of care"—taking preemptive measures to protect young users—and extends that responsibility to AI companies. The House version, championed by Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), diluted that provision significantly in late November, drawing fury from child safety advocates. The House's exclusion from White House discussions has been notable to observers; Michael Toscano, senior fellow and director of the Family First Technology Initiative for the conservative Institute for Family Studies, noted that "[Blackburn] genuinely does not want House KOSA."
President Donald Trump has called for AI preemption to pass, meaning the Republican Party must find a path forward. Even if Trump successfully pressures House Republicans into alignment, Democrats—who learned of Blackburn's White House negotiations at the same time Republicans did—remain a political wild card. The window for action is narrow: after midterms, a Democratic Congress would likely block pro-industry deregulation entirely.